Guest post by “AMD has announced its support of Open GL 4.1 on Microsoft and Linux platforms in its latest driver release for a number of its graphics cards. The driver release, available on the AMD website for the ATI FirePro, ATI FireGl and AMD Radeon cards, will support OpenGL 4.1 for Microsoft’s Windows 7, Vista, XP, as well as Linux.”
Let’s hope AMD’s OpenGL support will at least become decent on most platforms. So far AMD is way behind comparing to Nvidia in regards to OpenGL.
Let’s hope AMD’s OpenGL support will at least become decent on most platforms. So far AMD is way behind comparing to Nvidia in regards to OpenGL.
Especially on Windows their OpenGL performance has been really lacking. I remember having read a study of several cards from different vendors and consistently ATi cards were doing 30%-40% worse than similar NVIDIA cards in OpenGL tests, whereas in DirectX their performance was a lot more level.
Though, that study was a year ago or something so I don’t know if they’ve improved lately.
Wasn’t AMD at one point not even caching textures for Opengl apps?
The Linux drivers finally got a fix for the ridiculous tearing issue that makes the later cards (the one you’d use fglrx with) such a poor choice for video. It’s still not quite official, so you need to issue the cryptic command aticonfig –set-pcs-u32=DDX,EnableTearFreeDesktop,1 and restart the X server for it to stick. Seems to work, but it does make my KDE desktop noticably laggier (not a huge problem, as it’s still fairly snappy). It’s something like triple buffering + vsync.
I got this from Phoronix.
Are they talking about a closed-source binary driver or are they releasing open-source code and possibly even documentation?
Documentation was released ages ago, and they’ve got a couple of developers working on the open source driver. This one is the proprietary blob, though. The one you want to use if you need serious OpenGL performance.
By “ages ago”, I suppose you mean May 2009, October 2009 and June 2010 for the more recent chipsets:
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
Indeed, the open source drivers for AMD/ATI chipsets are not written by AMD/ATI, they are written by Xorg, although ATI/AMD employees do make significant contributions.
The open source drivers are still trying to achieve a feature-complete status, and have largely not yet been optimised. The very first steps towards some optimisations are just beginning to arrive in the very latest beta drivers which work only with the as-yet-unreleased Linux kernel version 2.6.38.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r500_expande…
These first optimisations show significant promise, where the open source driver has in some cases now passed the fglrx closed source driver performance for some older chipsets (those chipsets for which the documentation has been available for a longer time).
Edited 2011-01-26 23:39 UTC
in some cases
In one case: world of padman. Not in plural. And that is a really poor case, too. Geesh that thing is hideous.
Well, the optimisations have only just begun.
Here is a new one coming up for glx, which sits above the drivers in the Xorg stack, and therefore will improve all Xorg drivers, not just ATI/AMD:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA1MQ
You start adding 20% optimisation here for page-flipping support in the linux 2.6.38 kernel, and then another 20% there in glx for “decoding the opcode into the appropriate index into the dispatch tables” (whatever that means), and another 30% improvement by using the Gallium3D drivers versus the classic Mesa drivers, and pretty soon you have overtaken fglrx without really trying.
Edited 2011-01-27 00:52 UTC
Well, running Microsoft’s psychedelic browser benchmark in Firefox 4 beta with the open source driver (Gallium3D) gets something like 10x the performance of fglrx (1700 or so rpm on my computer). So there, now it’s plural.
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/PsychedelicBrowsing/D…
Well of course the documentation for the more recent chipsets is newer, but you selected the dates: I see also 2007 and 2008 dates in the directory you linked..